Artists' London: Holbein to Hirst

Abstract

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the East End of London is the locus for thousands of painters, sculptors, photographers, and printers who have transformed a largely neglected area into a vibrant creative quarter. The migration of artists and galleries to the East End over the last thirty years is only the latest example of the regeneration of a hitherto unpromising part of the city. Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the City, the fashionable areas of Covent Garden, Hampstead, Kensington, and Chelsea were all colonized in their turn by artists, reflecting the parallel development of the artist's identity from artisan to respectable gentleman to decadent dandy. The twentieth-century annexation of such previously unprepossessing areas as Camden Town, Bloomsbury, Fitzrovia, and Soho consolidated the Bohemian status of artists. Artists' London explores the complex relationship between artists and the areas of London they inhabit, examining such figures as Hans Holbein, Sir Joshua Reynolds, William Blake, J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler, Walter Sickert, Francis Bacon, Damien Hirst, and Tracey Emin.